rel="nofollow" href="#u51b50950-b330-57f6-86bd-1703e387c94d">Title Page
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Epigraph
1997: Okay, Computer
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
2007: A Very Modern Piracy
2017: That Be-My-Baby Drumbeat
2027: Wave after Wave, Each Mightier than the Last
2037: Every Time it Rains
1987: I Won’t Forget
2047: Present Tense
2§§7: Of Organon
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by James Smythe
About the Publisher
I’m sifting through the post, looking for the telltale return address on the telephone bill that I’m going to steal before my parents can see it. My glasses steam up, because Mum keeps the house warm all the time, and my glasses always steam up when it’s raining outside, putting me in a foggy microclimate of my very own. I try to clean them on my shirt, but that’s damp as well. I end up smearing the water around. Hate that. But then, here we go, some industrial estate in Durham. This is it. The phone company has started sending the letters unmarked, which I suppose prevents fraud or something, but really just makes my life a lot harder. The rain kicks up, sounding like a snare drum; the rat-a-tat-tat of the start of a song. I kick my shoes off, slide them under the radiator. I don’t want wet footprints through the house. One less thing for Mum to freak out about. As I get upstairs, I yank off my drenched tights, chuck them into the basket in the bathroom. Grab socks from the airing cupboard, still warm, and I go to my room, lie on the bed, pull them on with my feet stuck up in the air. The bill next to me on the bed. My bed, like the rest of my room, is a mess. That’s what Mum says, but I know that everything has its own place. Maybe it’s just not as ordered as her stuff is, but then I’ve never been one for that level of organisation.
Stub comes up, chunk of tail trying to swish and failing. He noses at me.
‘Not now,’ I say, which I reckon might be all I ever really say to the cat. But, really, not now. There’s a bit of time pressure here. Every month I intercept the bill as soon as it arrives. I panic, because I know how bad it’s going to be. I need them to not see it; and I have to read the number myself, to know how bad it’s going to be. I use this old letter opener that used to be my dad’s – my real dad’s, but maybe it was his dad’s first, I don’t actually know – and I slide it along the stuck-down flap. Every time, I try to prise the glue apart rather than cutting it. Every time, I tell myself that, if I manage to do this successfully, stealthily, I can put the letter back afterwards, and they’ll never know. But I always wreck the paper so much it’s not even a remote possibility. It’s a ritual now. Every month I read the whole bill. I recognise the calls I’ve made, the times that I made them. Every weeknight of my life I get home from school, and then, like, an hour later I’m on the phone to the people that I’ve just spent the entire day with, talking about the things we did – and did together! – earlier that day. I know it’s stupid, I know, but it’s what we do. Everybody does it. We take it in turns with who calls who, because otherwise you get an engaged tone for hours. And, God, if you get one of them when you know you’re meant to be speaking to somebody else, that’s the most tense hour or whatever of your life. Because, who are they talking to? And what does that mean?
Then, when I’ve read the bill, I get rid of it. Throw it in a bin on my way to school. I know that doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t stop the money going out of their account at the end of the month, and it doesn’t stop them asking where the bill is, raging at the amount, shouting at me. They know I’ve taken it, but I’m strong. I blame the postman. Paul keeps threatening to make me pay some of it back out of my Saturday wages or whatever, though I’m meant to be saving for university, so I don’t think he’s serious. I want to tell them: it’s not because I don’t want them to see it, I just have to know how bad it’s going to be. Every month they tell me that I’ve got to think about other people with the phone, that somebody might be trying to get through. And, as well as thinking about other people, I should think about myself. That’s my mum’s favourite one. Think about yourself, Laura, she says; because you have to work hard this year to make sure that everything else falls into place. Every month we have the conversation, and I’m like, I know, Mum. I swear, I know. Doesn’t mean I can’t speak to my friends.
And it doesn’t mean I don’t want to use the Internet, either. And it’s that 0845 AOL number that’s been the real cost these past few months.
This month? The total at the bottom of the bill is huge. Biggest it’s been. My hands shake. Shit.
I hear a bang from downstairs. The front door, the slamming shut of it.
‘Laura?’ my mother calls. Does she sound angry? I can’t tell. The sound of her feet on the landing, coming up the stairs. Walking so heavily that I’m sure it’s because she wants me to hear her. I open the second drawer down and throw the envelope in, all the different bits of it. Pages and pages of numbers, like some awful spreadsheet – and when has a spreadsheet ever not been bad news? – but the drawer jams, slightly, when I try to shut it, because it’s so crammed full, so I have to really work it to get it closed, creeping my hand in, forcing the pages along, pushing them down. ‘Are you home?’ she shouts, from right outside my bedroom.
‘Yeah, come in,’ I say. Hand shakes; voice shakes. Come on, Laura, keep it together. ‘You’re home early,’ I say, as she pushes the door open. Before she can speak.
‘You’re soaking wet,’ she says. I can see myself in the mirror, over her shoulder. My hair’s a state. She really hates that I don’t do more with my hair. ‘Didn’t you have your little brolly with you?’
‘It’s fine,’ I tell her. She looks past me: at what I see as order, but she sees as something entirely chaotic.
‘And you keep this room so cold,’ she says, looking at my open window; an open window that she basically forces me to have because of her insane addiction to constantly-on radiators. ‘You’ll catch your death,’ but that bit of caring is only a pretence; a prelude to what she really wants to say. ‘You have to sort this heap out, you know.’ She scans the whole room, looking at every single bit of it, somehow, in only a few seconds. Like her eyes are able to flick from mess to mess faster than any other human’s can. Somehow inhuman.
‘Fine,’ I reply. The desk is covered in electric leads and books and bits of schoolwork; and there are piles of clothes on the floor; and there’s all this stuff
